Born Charlotte Turner into a genteel and affluent family, Smith experienced early tragedy, with her mother dying when Charlotte was a young child. Smith’s life was also marked by her father’s extravagance with money. In 1765, at nearly sixteen years old, she was married off to a wealthy though profligate and abusive husband, Benjamin Smith, a marriage she soon came to see as a hideous error, referring to herself as ‘sold, a legal prostitute,’ in a letter to Sarah Rose.1 Her husband’s mounting debts landed him in debtor’s prison in 1783 where Smith joined him. Her first self‐funded collection, Elegiac Sonnets, and Other Essays by Charlotte Smith of Bignor Park, Sussex (1784), proved a great success, and the profits from the collection secured her husband’s release from prison. However, he was unable to reform, leading the couple to leave for France in October 1784. Returning in 1785, Smith legally separated from her husband in 1787, leaving her with sole responsibility for their eight surviving children (the union had produced twelve). Highly influential and popular, Smith’s collection revived the sonnet form in the Romantic period, and went through many editions owing to its instant acclaim.
Despite her success as a poet, Smith turned to novel writing, producing eleven novels which represent, as Stuart Curran claims, ‘the major achievement in English fiction during those years [1788–1798]’.2 The novels and the poetry share preoccupations, most notably Smith’s fascination with representing heroines beset by strife. Though drawing on circumstances from her own life, Smith’s oeuvre reveals her ability to blur the line between biography and artistry in a way that anticipates how Romanticism would develop from Wordsworth to Byron. Having experienced the vicissitudes of the legal system after the death of her father‐in‐law, Richard Smith, she was well placed to represent its injustice. Her politicized vision is notable in all her novels, but particularly evident in her final novel, The Young Philosopher (1798), whose protagonist leaves the crumbling ancien régime of England in hopes of a better life in an idealized vision of the American republic.
The greatest loss of Smith’s life was the death of her much‐loved daughter, Anna Augusta, in 1795. Once again Smith created art out of adversity, and the second volume of Elegiac Sonnets is suffused with mourning for her loss. The Emigrants (1793) shows Smith’s poetic range as well as recalling her novels’ political undertones; it suggests, only to refuse, epic grandeur. Smith focuses on the suffering of French émigrés reeling from the loss of their country, friends, and family in the aftermath of the violence of the French Revolution, and their British counterparts, such as the poor and the poet herself, whose victimhood mirrors the dispossessed French émigrés. Smith draws little distinction between the French and the British victims, emphasizing the powerlessness of her subjects in the poetry. Her final volume of poetry, Beachy Head and Other Poems, was unfinished but offers, as Curran shows, ‘an alternate Romanticism that seeks not to transcend or to absorb nature but to contemplate and honor its irreducible alterity’.3
Stuart Curran, ‘Introduction’, in The Poems of Charlotte Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. xix–xxix; Loraine Fletcher, Charlotte Smith: A Critical Biography (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998); Sarah M. Zimmerman, ‘Smith, Charlotte (1749–1806)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, October 2007 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/25790, accessed 9 August 2015]; Charlotte Smith (1749–1806): doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/25790.